Contemporary African American Literature Research Articles

A Survey of Contemporary African American Poetry, Drama, & Fiction

Analysis of literature indicates that varying viewpoints about different elements which define contemporary African American Literature has been identified. Majority of the scholarly works on African American writing are built on foundation of culture, political oppression and the need to express their true needs. This paper explores the current trends in contemporary African American Literature by examining tenets in poetry, fiction and drama. Through the ages African American poetry, novels and drama can be considered to a chronicle documenting the struggles of a race which has been debated, debased and their humanity violated to the fight against oppression, social and political empowerment. From the views of this paper it can be concluded that the African American writing is not simply a reflection of the chain of events that took place but was a factor in change. Most of the writers and the works which have been highlighted in this essay have shown one primary theme: the use of literature as the means to voice their anger about social and economic repression. Keywords: s

Voicing Strategies Employed in Narrow Listening Among Iranian Female Freshmen

Analysis of literature indicates that varying viewpoints about different elements which define contemporary African American Literature has been identified. Majority of the scholarly works on African American writing are built on foundation of culture, political oppression and the need to express their true needs. This paper explores the current trends in contemporary African American Literature by examining tenets in poetry, fiction and drama. Through the ages African American poetry, novels and drama can be considered to a chronicle documenting the struggles of a race which has been debated, debased and their humanity violated to the fight against oppression, social and political empowerment. From the views of this paper it can be concluded that the African American writing is not simply a reflection of the chain of events that took place but was a factor in change. Most of the writers and the works which have been highlighted in this essay have shown one primary theme: the use of literature as the means to voice their anger about social and economic repression. Keywords: s

Rountree, Wendy: The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African American Young Adult Literature

Rountree, Wendy: The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African American Young Adult Literature. New York: Peter Land, 2011. ISBN 978-1-43310574-6

Contemporary African American Children's Literature

What is transformed from myth, history, and family narrative in my own fictions is not a play-pretty to be held in the hands of children. My fictions for young people derive from the progress of Bl...

The Dark Room Collective and Post-Soul Poetics

Generation next does not labor under burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubian. ... [T]hey know how to bring pain and profanity but also prophecy, redemption, and light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once identified as Changing Same of African continuum. (Tate 630) In November 1986 aspiring poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange met in University Film Archive. A few months later, housemate of Strange's moved out, and Ellis replaced her (Ellis, Interview 90). Their three-story Victorian in Cambridge's Central Square--31 Inman Street--soon became meeting place for diverse cast of young black artists and intellectuals. James Baldwin's funeral in December 1987 galvanized this group and gave it sense of common cause. (Baldwin died / and we became church, as Ellis puts it [T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. 11.68-69]). Its members rechristened themselves Dark Room Collective--so-named for small, dimly lit room in house that once held photographic enlarger but gradually began to accumulate (Valentine 59)--and remade themselves as something of pre or PMFA: [W]e'd read one book, then trade and different books. We didn't always read them in order they were written, but would place them in order and talk about why one book was written after another; we looked for things that held books together, argued with decisions authors made and made critical judgments, all time developing our own tastes and literary vocabularies. Lonely fun done together. And when you're doing something like that around who are taking it very seriously, it gives you support and strength. (Ellis, Interview 91) The collective also provided an object lesson in the necessity of ... working hard, to come up with something new--no one wanted to be weak link in chain! It was like joining big band or something and cutting your chops that way, before you became soloist or had your own gig (Young, Interview 50). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Dark Room provided young African American writers a way of overcoming isolation, an opportunity to share similar struggles with writing with other Black people at time when European Americans still dominated most positions of authority in US poetry establishment (Strange 296). In 1989 collective inaugurated its now-famous Dark Room Reading Series. Initially, readings took place in living room at 31 Inman, and publicity for events was both informal and local. Little typed messages began appearing on bulletin boards around Cambridge, Askold Melnyczuk recalls (513). Landlord problems, however, soon forced relocation first to Institute of Contemporary Art and then to Boston Playwrights' Theatre. These new venues brought wider exposure. White Cambridge and Harvard Square took notice, and Dark Room quickly found itself behaving less like an improvised gathering of like-minded friends and more like an official entity with business side (Ellis, Loud 39). During its five year run, series succeeded in bringing to town some of biggest names in contemporary African American literature, among them Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Moseley. (1) Tracy K. Smith recalls transformative experience of watching like Michael S. Harper and Thylias Moss give these amazing readings and stage with who were just little older than myself, and who were taking their art very seriously. And I realized that I wanted to be doing that, too (Something 868). The Dark Room Reading Series also brought national attention to collective. [W]e appeared in Emerge, Boston Globe, New Yorker, on NPR, and in numerous newsletters and anthologies (Ellis, Notes). …

Critical essays on John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman is one of the most prominent African American writers today. He is the first author to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-once in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet, despite all of Wideman's accolades and renown, there are only three full-length studies on his work to date. TuSmith's and Byerman's Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman takes a bold step in expanding Wideman scholarship. This volume is an indispensable study of Wideman's oeuvre, covering the full range of his career by addressing the key features of his fiction and nonfiction from 1967 to the present. The essays in this book reflect the most advanced thinking on Wideman's prolific, extraordinary art. The collection features at least one article on each major work and includes the voices of both well-established and emerging scholars. Though their critical perspectives are diverse, the contributors place Wideman squarely at the center of contemporary African American literature as an exemplar of postmodern approaches to literary art. Several position Wideman within the context of his predecessors-Wright, Baldwin, Ellison-and within a larger cultural context of music and collective history. The essays examine Wideman's complex style and his blending of African and Western cosmologies and aesthetics, the use of personal narrative, and his imaginative revisioning of forgotten historical events. These insightful analyses cover virtually every stage of Wideman's career and every genre in which he has written. A detailed bibliography of Wideman's work is also included. Informed yet accessible, this collection will be a rich source of information and intellectual stimulus for teachers, students, and scholars in American and African American literature, as well as general readers interested in Wideman's multilayered and challenging texts.

Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature

Dualism in ralph ellison's invisible man I am outside of history, i wash i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in its cage i am inside of history, its hungrier than i thot --Ishmael Reed (1972) The fields of African American literature and studies have only recently begun to inform each other's critical discourses. Many of the existing critical works about in African American literature primarily focus on the body and the literary portrayal and role of physical disabilities. (1) In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson makes the compelling argument that African American writers such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry offer an African-American female self grounded in the singular body that the etchings of history and whose validation, power, and identity derive from physical difference and resistance to cultural norms (105, emphasis added). In light of American history's traumatic impact on the African American body, the discussion of physical difference and in African American literature needs further analysis. Additionally, critics need to theorize the different mind in African American literature, which, as I argue below, in many ways bears the etchings of history. More specifically, contemporary African American literature has portrayed characters with different, melancholic minds as figures who are not to be pathologized but who must be read as subjects engaged in acts of political resistance to dominant versions of memory and historiography. While has traditionally been understood as a personal, disabling mental or emotional condition, I argue that contemporary African American literature has claimed this form of mental difference as a source of political empowerment, while simultaneously holding a white racist system responsible for the emergence of this condition of emotional difference. Esther Sanchez-Pardo has examined the link between melancholia, modernism, sexuality, and race; she argues that melancholia has a constitutive role in modernist sexualities (2). I would like to expand on this examination by offering a discussion of Freudian ideas of and their relationship to contemporary African American literature. Perhaps the closest link between studies and the theorization of mental or emotional difference in contemporary African American literature can be located in the growing field of trauma studies. In recent years J. Brooks Bouson, Lisa Garbus, Robert Holton, Deborah Horvitz, Lisa Woolfork, and other critics have drawn on Cathy Caruth's works to discuss the wounded, altered, and literally or metaphorically disabled black self in African American literature. Another form of mental difference has been examined by Katy Ryan in Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction. Ryan discusses the role of what may be the ultimate self-inflicted disability in Morrison's works. None of these critical examinations, however, has established an explicit link with studies. My discussion of in contemporary African American literature draws on both studies and trauma studies in an attempt to formulate a new theory of loss in African American literature. Traditional western theories of mourning and define as a mental or emotional condition that has the potential to disable a subject to the point of death or, more precisely, suicide. However, in thinking through the role of in twentieth-century African American literature one must engage a series of problems. First, it is imperative to revisit western definitions and theories of the mourning or melancholic subject. Most of these theories build on Freudian approaches to mourning. Beyond an assessment of what it means to mourn or to be melancholic according to traditional western classifications, it is crucial to explore the extent to which antebellum African Americans were allowed access to such emotional expressions and how antebellum realities have left an imprint on twentieth-century African American literature. …

"Illuminating the Darkened Corridors": An Interview with Alexs Pate

The first time I saw Alexs Pate I was startled. I couldn't believe that this man--clad in a loose black shirt, jeans, steel-toed boots, and a head full of chin-length dreadlocks, carrying a black Diesel bag--was a professor. A writer. He wrote Amistad? And even more surprising, after seeing this anomalous image, was listening to his voice, which was soft, serene, even tranquil at times. Pate, born and raised in Philadelphia, imparts his iconoclastic image onto his work. He is an innovator, clairvoyant in his observations about love, humanity, and freedom. Pate, who has published five novels and a collection of poetry in a span of eight years, breaks new ground in the realm of African American literature. He shatters stereotypes associated with African American men and the African American home with the novels Losing Absalom (1994) and Finding Makeba (1997). He probes the nature of guilt that African American men feel as a result of the societal stereotypes that mark them as villains, as outlaws in his collection of poems innocent (1998) and in his recent novel The Multicultiboho Sideshow (1999). And finally in his new novel, West of Rehobeth (2001), he introduces a young boy, coming of age into a world full of guilt and despair, who learns the importance of maintaining innocence and hope. This interview took place on June 10, 2000, at his home in Minneapolis, MN. It delves deep into the heart of Pate's novels and poetry as it explores themes in his work such as guilt and innocence. It examines Pate's philosophies on writing, on the job of the artist, on the importance of African American male writers, and on the state of contemporary African American literature. Ultimately, it gives us a clearer understanding of the relationship between Pate's work and his attempt to stimulate positive growth and change in our world. Link: Describe what it was like growing up in Philadelphia. Pate: I grew up in North Philadelphia, fairly deep in the hood. I lived on a block in the middle of a lot of poverty, but I lived in an enclave where most of the people owned their houses. Everybody had cars. It was a working middle-class community. Most of the fathers in the neighborhood worked one or two jobs, at least. Most of our mothers worked, too. It was like these black people, my parents and the people that were like them, really believed in the American Dream, and they worked hard to achieve it. They also worked hard to prepare their kids educationally. It was a time where kids learned etiquette and manners. There were clubs, Boy Scouts, summer camps, and summer vacations. I remember somebody in the neighborhood would gather up all the kids once a week during the summer to go for a ride. We would drive out of the neighborhood and into the suburbs to get ice cream, or to have a change of scenery. I had a good childhood, but it wasn't idyllic because, at the same time, I lived around a lot of gangs and gang fighting. I was constantly dodging the impact of gang violence on the streets. It was around us, but it wasn't among us. We were among it. I wasn't untouched by it, but I wasn't molded by it either. I was molded by the fact that most of my friends' families were intact. And I always had to contend with which parent was watching me because somebody's parent was always near. My mother made me read a lot, so I spent a lot of time in my room reading. That's where I developed a love for stories. My dad and I would go to baseball games to see the Phillies play regularly. He'd play ball with me, or I'd play ball with my friends out on the streets. I sort of vacillated between being studious and being a street jock. Of course, my family had a lot of stress, usually around money, but I grew up basically like a Disney kid. There was a certain kind of innocence actually, when I think about it--even among all the chaos and violence in the community. …

Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. x + 209 pp. It wasn’t long ago that those of us who spent our professional lives writing about the experiences and representations of people of color, women, and working people were troubled, a few scandalized, by some of the antihumanist claims of postmodernity. The author seemed to be dying just as African American authors were being brought to renewed life; the subject became split, internally divided, eternally deferred, unintelligible, and essentially absent, just as women, workers, and otherwise colonized peoples were finding their voices and their subjectivities. For some, it appeared that the ontological claims of modernity (death and absence) and the epistemological pronouncements of postmodernism (deferral and aporia) were yet another means of ensuring that those wounded by the material realities of history would continue to be misserved by the intellectual climate of the present. The “other” emerged to find the self absent; the ethnic author was born into a cemetery. This history, for Madelyn Jablon, seems to be repeating itself from the other side. Anglo-European theorists are now claiming the end of postmodernity just as African American authors are beginning to get recognition for a long history of theories and practices of self-conscious artistic representation. Just as African American authors otherwise [End Page 502] as diverse in subject matter and style as Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Albert Murray, Xam Cartiér, Leon Forrest, Reginald McKnight, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ntozake Shange produce works of heightened self-consciousness, of “Black metafiction,” William Gass, the critic who coined the term “metafiction,” is condemning the practice as a form of solipsistic, bourgeois self-indulgence, and advocating a “new realism.” Intellectual trends, it seems, just keep exceeding the grasp of ethnic literary practitioners, just keep excluding the rabble from the elite. Black writers in the seventies found themselves serious subjects in an age of play, and in the nineties become playful artists in an age turning serious. It is hard to tell whether this historical repetition is tragedy or farce. In this study of self-conscious texts in contemporary African American fiction, Jablon offers two challenges to those who have theorized and renounced metafiction. First, she claims that earlier theoretical descriptions of metafictional practices were radically flawed because they did not take into account the developments in Black metafiction. Second, she argues that rumors of the death of metafiction are premature given the vitally robust quality of metafictional texts in contemporary African American literature. The study falls into five parts, Jablon demonstrating how African American artists since the sixties have written about the “thematization of art,” revised the trajectory of the künstlerroman, practiced and shown the limits of intertextuality, employed the oral tradition to exemplify the play of voice in written texts, and transformed popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. After an introduction in which she draws on the mainstream theories of metafiction formulated by Linda Hutcheon, William Gass, Patricia Waugh, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and then shows in what ways these theories are reconfigured by African Americanists like Deborah McDowell, Henry Louis Gates, Gwendolyn Mae Henderson, Donald Gibson, and Houston Baker, Jablon turns to extended readings of ten novels that exemplify the five techniques of Black metafiction. She reads Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Alice Walker’s Temple of My Familiar as expressions of artistic self-consciousness in which the characters who are artists represent “black metafictionists” and the artistic process itself becomes a metaphor for African American self-fashioning. Rita Dove’s Through the Ivory Gate and Arthur Flower’s [End Page 503] Another Good Loving Blues are texts that redefine the künstlerroman’s conception of who can be an artist and what constitutes conflict. Taking as her exemplary texts Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Jablon shows how contemporary African American texts revise and rewrite their predecessor texts (for A Lesson it is Native Son, for Tar Baby, the mythic folktale and Their Eyes Were Watching God). Charlotte Watson-Sherman’s...

Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings

Midwives, women healers and root workers have been central figures in the African American folk traditions. Particularly in Black communities in the rural south, these women served vital social, cultural and political functions. It was believed that they possessed magical powers: they negotiated the barrier between life and death and were often regarded as the knower in a community. Today even as medical science has discredited or superseded their power, granny midwives have resurfaced as pivotal characters in the narratives of contemporary African American literature. Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers examines the lives of real granny midwives and other healers--through oral narratives, ethnographic research and documentation--and considers them in tandem with their fictional counterparts in the work of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and others.

Postcolonial discourse and changing cultural contexts: theory and criticism

Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality by Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram Rereading Fanon, Rewriting Caribbean History by Patrick Taylor The Dialectics of Negritude: Or, the (Post)Colonial Subject in Contemporary African-American Literature by Christopher Wise The Colonial Voice in the Motherland by Judie Newman Minor Pleasures by Indira Karamcheti Women's Rights versus Feminism? Postcolonial Perspectives by Harveen Sachdeva Mann Plantation Cafes: Jazz, Postcolonial Theory, and Modernism by Burton W. Peretti Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora: Figuring Home, Locating Histories by Anindyo Roy Postcolonial Spaces and Deterritorialized (Homo)Sexuality: The Films of Hanif Kureishi by Radhika Mohanram Is My Body Proper? Postcoloniality in the Classroom by Gita Rajan The Media Scene and Postcolonial Theories: An Interview with Prajna Paramita Parasher by Gita Rajan Retrospective Hallucination: Postcolonial Video as Cultural Critique by Amy Villarejo History, Folklore, and Commonsense: Sembene's Films and Discourses of Postcoloniality by Marcia Landy Biculturalism, Postcolonialism, and Identity Politics in New Zealand: An Interview with Anna Yeatman and Kaye Turner by Radhika Mohanram Postcolonialism/Multiculturalism--Australia 1993: An Interview with Sneja Gunew by Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram Selected Bibliography Index

Towards the Poetization of the "Field of Manners"

In awarding 1993 Nobel Prize for literature African American novelist Toni Morrison, Swedish Academy called Morrison literary artist of first rank whose work is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at same time rich variation. The Academy statement then applauded Morrison's linguistic achievement by proclaiming that writer delves into language itself, a language she wants liberate from fetters of race. As Paul Gray correctly observes, Academy made an honorable choice Morrison, but for at least one wrong reason. Her purpose, Gray notes, is the blackness of her characters and bestow them an abstract that can understand. It is, instead, insist upon particular racial identities of her fictional people - black women and men under stresses peculiar them and their station U.S. - and to break through limitations and prejudices of those lucky enough read her fiction (Gray 87). Indeed, what is so problematic about Swedish Academy's statement is that search for abstract universalities only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls of essential. Williams posits that traditional notion of typicality literature is in effect a rendering of 'universals,' those characteristics which purport be permanently important elements of human nature and human condition (101). The problem with upholding traditional definition of typicality, Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, seeking out permanent elements of human social situation, gravitate toward not only recognition of essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability (102). African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees problem of the rhetoric of universality be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including African American voice, Henderson would prefer the privileging of difference, or multiplicity of 'interested readings,' order resist the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present. Henderson remains concerned that the rhetoric of . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from dominant literary-critical discourse as well as socio-political centers of power, and she observes that the reduction of multiplicity undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists speak for all women, black men speak for all blacks, and white males speak for everyone (156).(2) Indeed, contrary what is suggested Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, best writings African American literature are those that use languages that transcend African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls huge silences literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined (M. Brown 6A). The best writings African American literature challenge cultural, political, and social configuration of literary voice America with their insistence on celebrating African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from New York Times, My world did shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.(3) To understand ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, reappropriate our understanding of dialectical relationship between specificity and and between marginality and centralization; appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is understand importance for African Americans achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr. …

Teaching Contemporary African-American Literature

Teaching Contemporary African-American Literature